Archives de catégorie : London 2021 Nonfiction

WHERE DID THE UNIVERSE COME FROM de Chris Ferrie & Geraint F. Lewis

Do you ever look up to the stars and wonder about what is out there? An accessible science narrative for readers of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this book allows readers to eavesdrop on a conversation between two Award-winning physicists and delve into a multidisciplinary discussion of our understanding of the universe.

WHERE DID THE UNIVERSE COME FROM?
and Other Cosmic Questions: Our Universe, from the Quantum to the Cosmos
by Chris Ferrie & Geraint F. Lewis
Sourcebooks, September 2021

Over the last few centuries, humans have successfully unraveled much of the language of the universe, exploring and defining formerly mysterious phenomena such as electricity, magnetism, and matter through the beauty of mathematics. But some secrets remain beyond our realm of understanding—and seemingly beyond the very laws and theories we have relied on to make sense of the universe we inhabit. It is clear that the quantum, the world of atoms and electrons, is entwined with the cosmos, a universe of trillions of stars and galaxies…but exactly how these two extremes of human understanding interact remains a mystery. WHERE DID THE UNIVERSE COME FROM? and Other Cosmic Questions allows readers to eavesdrop on a conversation between award-winning physicists Chris Ferrie and Geraint F. Lewis as they examine the universe through the two unifying and yet often contradictory lenses of classical physics and quantum mechanics, tackling questions such as: Where did the universe come from? Why do dying stars rip themselves apart? Do black holes last forever? What is left for humans to discover?
A brief but fascinating exploration of the vastness of the universe, this book will have armchair physicists turning the pages until their biggest and smallest questions about the cosmos have been answered.

Chris Ferrie is an award-winning physicist and Senior Lecturer for Quantum Software and Information at the University of Technology Sydney. He has a BMath in Mathematical Physics and a PhD in Applied Mathematics. He lives in Australia with his wife and children.
Geraint F. Lewis is an award-winning astrophysicist and Professor of Astrophysics at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy.

OPIUM QUEEN de Gabrielle Paluch

In OPIUM QUEEN, Gabrielle Paluch shines a well-deserved light on the previously untold personal history of a woman who was thoroughly ahead of her time, and who was at the center of global events that altered the course of history..

OPIUM QUEEN:
The Untold Story of the Woman Warlord Who Ruled the Golden Triangle
by Gabrielle Paluch
Rowman & Littlefield, April 2022

A fearless Burmese warlord, Olive Yang dressed, smoked, fought, and loved like one of the boys, rebelling against the confines of her gender from a very young age and later carrying on eyebrow-raising love affairs with a movie starlet, a General’s wife, and her own prison warden, amongst others. Beloved and revered by her soldiers, this trailblazing woman reigned over a powerful army that controlled the Golden Triangle from the end of World War II to the early 1960s, and infamously assisted the CIA in their plan to arm militias against Communist Chinese troops. Perhaps most fascinatingly of all, this female firebrand has largely been forgotten, relegated solely to the footnotes of history books. Until a few years ago, no one even seemed to know whether Olive was alive or dead. Determined to right this wrong, Gabrielle Paluch set out on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to find Olive Yang. What she found is, as they say, stranger than fiction.
Intertwining Olive’s story with her own quest to uncover it, Gabrielle Paluch raises difficult questions about the US’s covert intervention in Burma, which is largely to thank for the birth of the modern opium trade, delves deeply into questions of gender and sexuality, and takes a look at the complicated history of the nation now known as Myanmar, which remains in turmoil to this day.

Gabrielle Paluch spent six years living in Myanmar and Thailand, reporting on both countries for Voice of America, the LA Times and other publications. In 2016, she earned an MA from Columbia University’s Graduate School in Journalism and was an Overseas Press Club Scholar, awarded the H.L. Stevenson Fellowship for her groundbreaking reporting on female genital mutilation in Thailand. As an investigative reporter, Gabrielle has been a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Associated Press, Times of London, Newsweek, CNN, Al Jazeera, and many others. She was the last journalist to meet with Olive Yang before she died. In 2017, her obituary of Olive Yang ran in the New York Times Saturday Profile; it was selected by the Times as one of the 11 best profiles of a woman that year and was nominated for a Southeast-Asian Overseas Press Award in Feature Writing.

THE DINOSAUR WARS de Gerta Keller

Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl meets Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction in this work of popular science which blends the personal narrative of a trailblazing woman’s life in a male-dominated scientific field with a highstakes inquiry into what really killed the dinosaurs, the greatest scientific detective story of our time.

THE DINOSAUR WARS: MY LIFE AS A WARRIOR SCIENTIST IN THE DINOSAUR WARS
by Gerta Keller
Penguin Press, October 2022
(via Writers House)

World-renowned geologist and paleontologist Gerta Keller is at the center of what has been called the nastiest feud in science, a contentious debate popularly known as “The Dinosaur Wars” over what triggered the fifth mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Era sixty-six million years ago. Dinosaurs have enthralled us for generations, and the question of what caused their demise is more relevant than ever, as humankind confronts the paroxysms of an imperiled planet and the possibility that we may become the dinosaurs of the sixth extinction.
Born into a life of poverty on a small farm in Switzerland as the sixth of a dozen children, Gerta was told her dreams of becoming a doctor were impossible. Defying the odds, Gerta reclaimed her childhood dream of studying science, ultimately completing her graduate studies in geology at Stanford and becoming a professor at Princeton University and a major voice in her field. Along the way, she overcame the hostility and disdain of her male colleagues, who sabotaged her work, took credit for her discoveries, and chided her for not “knowing her place.”
Driven by a relentless passion to discover the truth of Earth’s catastrophic upheavals, Gerta continued her research in a series of incredible adventures across the globe that have caused some to liken her to a female Indiana Jones and which led her to uncover a growing mass of evidence that contradicted the then-widely-accepted asteroid impact theory. Rather, Gerta discovered, the real cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction was Deccan volcanism, a series of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions on the Indian peninsula. Outraged by her daring to challenge them, the toxic, male scientific establishment launched an all-out war against Gerta, doing their utmost to sabotage her work, destroy her reputation, and suppress the publication of her research. But they picked a fight with the wrong woman.

Gerta Keller is a Professor of Paleontology and Geology in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University, where she has been a tenured faculty member since 1984. She has placed over 260 scientific publications in international journals and is considered a leading authority on catastrophes and mass extinctions, and the biotic and environmental effects of impacts and volcanism. She has co-authored five academic books, is a frequent lecturer, and regularly receives invitations from academic institutions around the world. In recent years, her work has received increased recognition and continues to make waves in the mainstream media, including TV documentaries and news features, radio and podcast interviews, and print and web media, most notably in a widely circulated profile in The Atlantic.

TALK WITH HER de Kimberly Wolf

TALK WITH HER:
A Dad’s Essential Guide to Raising Empowered Girls
by Kimberly Wolf
Penguin Life, May 2022

As an entrepreneur launching a girls’ health and wellness company, Kimberly Wolf found herself talking to many high-powered male investors, creatives, and advisors. But what they wanted to talk about took her by surprise. They all wanted to ask questions about their teenage daughters—what they should say to them, what they should do for them, or whether they should step aside and leave it to mom (or just wait it out).
Wolf realized dads needed real guidance, and that she could help. Daughters who have healthy communication with their dads are known to have more a more positive sense of self, better nutritional habits, and more successful careers. In TALK WITH HER, she gives dads a toolbox filled with insights into girlhood, proven communication methods, and anecdotes and advice based on interviews with more than 100 dads and daughters. More importantly, she offers straight talk about what teenage girls are going through and dozens of actionable strategies and scripts to help dads get through to their girls even if their girls won’t give them the time of day. It all adds up to a framework that will give dads the confidence they need to communicate with their daughters and raise empowered women.

Kimberly Wolf is a wellness educator and the founder of Girlmentum Labs, a web-based educational media consulting company supporting girls’ health and wellness. She is a graduate of Brown (BA, 2006, women’s studies) and Harvard (M.Ed., 2009, human development and psychology) where she worked closely with Richard Weissbourd, director of Human Development & Psychology Program.

THE GRIEVING BRAIN de Mary-Frances O’Connor

THE GRIEVING BRAIN:
How Our Neurons Map Love and Loss
by Mary-Frances O’Connor
Harper One, March 2022

There is the initial pain of loss, and then there is the grieving. We have long assigned grief to the realm of nebulous emotions, but we now know that the brain creates those emotions in response to many outside factors. Neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor has been studying the effects of grief on the brain and body for more than twenty years, and the clues she has found as to how we cope with loss turn out to be rooted in how we fall in love. In THE GRIEVING BRAIN, she explores this new territory and explains what happens inside the brain when we become attached to another and then lose that loved one—and why it can be so difficult to imagine a future without them. (Hint: Sometimes the brain leads us to believe the death is just not true.)
For readers of popular science such as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, as well as Joan Didion’s memoir of loss, The Year of Magical Thinking, THE GRIEVING BRAIN offers remarkable insight into the inner workings of our minds and the evolution of grief. O’Connor’s explanation of the brain’s reaction to loss is an inspiring look at love. And her discovery, that we should think of grief as a form of learning, is a bold new perspective on a timeless struggle.

Mary-Frances O’Connor is the award-winning director of the Grief, Loss and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab, and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. She earned her degrees in psychology from Northwestern and in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona, and she completed her clinical training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and Hospital and her post-doctoral fellowship at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. In 2017, she received the American Psychosomatic Society’s 75th Anniversary Award, given in recognition of her important career contributions in the field of mind-body medicine. She has previously appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition and Good Morning Tucson, and has been featured in the New York Times and Psychology Today, among many others.